Raisa of Upper Earth has never questioned the life arranged for her. When her father promises her to Lein, Crown Prince of Lower Earth, she accepts it as duty: the marriage will bind two estranged worlds together, and the infusion of Upper Earth technology that comes with it is meant to usher in a final age of enlightenment and end war between humans for good.
Nada of Lower Earth reads the same alliance very differently. Newly released from imprisonment, convinced that her cousin Lein has sold his people into a subtler and more total tyranny, she sets out undercover to disrupt the royal wedding and light the spark of a revolution. When Raisa goes missing from the only world she has known, she crosses paths with Nayf — Nada's fugitive twin brother — and the certainties she was raised on begin to come apart.
Fledgling is S. K. Ali's science-fiction debut and the first half of The Keeper's Records of Revolution duology. It is built as an archive: a collection of written records, gathered in secret, that lets nine narrators tell the revolution in their own unaltered words, in a world drawing on Middle Eastern and Islamic cultures. It was named a best book of 2024 by Kirkus Reviews, School Library Journal, Quill & Quire, and NPR.